# DeepSeek vs Zeli

DeepSeek records 372,761,591 monthly visits with +4.3% month-over-month growth and Freemium pricing. Zeli records 56,147 monthly visits with -46.8% growth and Free pricing.

| Metric | [DeepSeek](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek) | [Zeli](https://openaitools.app/tool/zeli) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.deepseek.com | https://zeli.app |
| Categories | Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models, AI API, AI Chatbot | AI Article Summarizer, AI Papers, AI News, AI Research Papers |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Free |
| Monthly Visits | 372,761,591 | 56,147 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +4.3% | -46.8% |
| Primary Market | China | China |
| Direct Visits | 291,585,405 | 39,950 |
| Review Score | 4.8 | 4.3 |
| Saved Count | 44 | 0 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Website |

## DeepSeek

DeepSeek (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd.) is a frontier AI research organization that disrupted the global LLM market by pairing open-weight transparency with breakthrough Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and reinforcement-learning reasoning efficiency. Following the landmark releases of DeepSeek-V3 and the peer-reviewed DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model, DeepSeek introduced the DeepSeek-V4 generation in 2026—featuring a hybrid attention architecture and a native 1-million-token context window across DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6T total parameters, 49B active per token) and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (284B total parameters, 13B active per token).

Users can interact with DeepSeek in three ways: completely free through the consumer web portal (chat.deepseek.com) and mobile apps with one-click toggles for deep thinking and live web search; via DeepSeek's hosted, OpenAI-compatible developer API; or by self-hosting DeepSeek's open-weight checkpoints (including V3, R1, Prover-V2, and distilled Qwen/Llama variants) on private infrastructure. The models excel at competitive mathematics, algorithm design, repository-level software engineering, and structured data extraction, with automatic context caching on the API that slashes repeated prompt costs by over 95%.

In late 2026, DeepSeek remains the price-performance benchmark for developers and automation workflows. While the consumer chat interface remains free without a mandatory $20/month subscription tier, the developer API transitioned in late 2026 to two primary endpoints—`deepseek-flash` and `deepseek-v4-pro`—with time-of-day pricing. Off-peak API calls cost just $0.15 per million input tokens ($0.003 on cache hits) and $0.60 per million output tokens on Flash, and $0.66 input / $1.98 output on V4-Pro, making it a fraction of the cost of comparable Western frontier models.

**Pricing & Plans:** Free web and mobile chat app at chat.deepseek.com; pay-as-you-go OpenAI-compatible API with off-peak rates at $0.15/1M input ($0.003 cache hit) and $0.60/1M output for deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash), and $0.66/1M input ($0.022 cache hit) and $1.98/1M output for deepseek-v4-pro (peak weekday UTC hours bill at 2x).

- **DeepSeek-V4 Hybrid Attention & 1M Context:** Leverages a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture (49B active parameters out of 1.6T on V4-Pro) to process up to 1 million tokens with minimal latency and memory overhead.
- **Transparent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning:** Pioneered by DeepSeek-R1 and integrated into V3.2 and V4 thinking modes, exposing step-by-step self-verification for complex math, logic, and code debugging.
- **Automatic Context Caching & Off-Peak API Pricing:** Drops input token costs to $0.003/1M on Flash and $0.022/1M on V4-Pro for cache hits, with 50% lower rates during off-peak UTC hours.
- **Free Consumer Web & Mobile Assistant:** Provides free access at chat.deepseek.com and on iOS/Android with document uploads, reasoning mode, and web search without paywalling core models.
- **Open-Weight Ecosystem & Self-Hosting Freedom:** Offers open weights for DeepSeek-V3, R1, Distill variants, and Prover models on Hugging Face and GitHub so enterprises can deploy within air-gapped environments.

**Strengths:** Completely free consumer web and mobile app with deep reasoning and web search included; Ultra-low API token rates ($0.15/$0.60 on Flash, $0.66/$1.98 on V4-Pro off-peak) with up to 98% savings on cached inputs; Drop-in OpenAI API compatibility makes switching or routing between models effortless; Strong open-weight lineage allows teams to self-host or fine-tune models without vendor lock-in

**Limitations:** Hosted API and web app store data on servers in China, prompting compliance restrictions for some Western enterprises and government agencies; Peak-hour API pricing (01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays) doubles per-token costs compared to off-peak rates; Lacks native voice mode, video generation, and productivity suite integrations offered by ChatGPT and Google Gemini

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/deepseek.md)

## Zeli

Zeli solves the oldest problem with Hacker News: the front page is a list of headlines, and deciding which of the thirty stories deserves your attention means opening all of them. Zeli mirrors that front page, attaches an AI-written summary and a representative key quote to each story, and translates everything into seven languages. The ranking tracks news.ycombinator.com and refreshes every fifteen minutes, so the feed stays current without you checking the orange site directly.

The structure is built around permanent, citable pages. Every story gets a URL keyed to its Hacker News item id — zeli.app/story/{id} in English, or zeli.app/{lang}/story/{id} for the other languages — carrying the translated title, the original title, a summary, a key quote and translated highlights from the discussion. Every day also gets a permanent archive of the complete front page, so a digest can be retrieved after that day has scrolled away. Alongside the news feed, Zeli digests HuggingFace's daily AI papers with translated titles and summaries, which makes it useful for keeping up with research as well as with developer chatter.

Content languages are English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish and Russian, with English served at the root and no language prefix. There is no account, no API key and no cost; an RSS feed bundles one item per day instead of flooding your reader, and the site can be installed as a PWA. For programmatic use, Zeli also publishes plain-markdown daily digests, JSON endpoints and an RSS feed aimed at feeds and AI agents. It requires no JavaScript and is served from an edge cache, so it is unusually light to read.

**Pricing & Plans:** Free. No account, no API key and no payment; the full site, the RSS feed and the machine-readable digests are all available at no cost.

- **AI summaries on every Hacker News story:** Each story carries a short summary generated from the linked article plus a standout key quote, so you can judge relevance before clicking through.
- **Seven-language translation:** The whole feed — titles, summaries and top comment highlights — is available in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish and Russian.
- **Daily front-page archive:** Every day gets a permanent page containing every story that hit the front page, retrievable long after the feed has moved on.
- **HuggingFace AI paper digests:** Daily AI papers are surfaced with translated titles and AI summaries, making Zeli a research reader as well as a news reader.
- **Machine-readable outputs:** One-item-per-day RSS feeds, plain-markdown digests, JSON endpoints and a sitemap make Zeli easy to pipe into readers or AI agents.

**Strengths:** Turns the Hacker News front page into a fast, scannable daily brief; Seven languages with genuinely translated titles, summaries and comment highlights; Permanent, citable story and daily archive pages that never expire; Free, no signup, no API key, installable as a PWA

**Limitations:** Summaries are machine-generated and are not fact-checked by a human; Real summaries exist only in seven languages — other locales fall back to English; It covers Hacker News and HuggingFace papers only, not your own reading list or arbitrary URLs; Keys off Hacker News ranking, so niche topics that never hit the front page are not included

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/zeli.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do DeepSeek and Zeli compare in monthly traffic?

DeepSeek has 372,761,591 monthly visits, while Zeli has 56,147. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality.

### How do their growth rates compare?

DeepSeek has a month-over-month growth rate of +4.3%; Zeli has -46.8%.

### How does pricing compare?

DeepSeek: Freemium. Free web and mobile chat app at chat.deepseek.com; pay-as-you-go OpenAI-compatible API with off-peak rates at $0.15/1M input ($0.003 cache hit) and $0.60/1M output for deepseek-flash (V4.1-Flash), and $0.66/1M input ($0.022 cache hit) and $1.98/1M output for deepseek-v4-pro (peak weekday UTC hours bill at 2x). Zeli: Free. Free. No account, no API key and no payment; the full site, the RSS feed and the machine-readable digests are all available at no cost.

## Alternatives

| # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 1 | [ChatGPT](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatgpt-4) | 6,048,022,723 | +2.2% | Freemium | Provides stronger multi-modal reasoning and agentic tools, but lacks DeepSeek's ultra-low-cost API pricing. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatgpt-4.md) |
| 2 | [Google Gemini](https://openaitools.app/tool/gemini-gemini-advanced) | 2,637,398,242 | -0.1% | Freemium | Offers an enormous context window and deep Google ecosystem integration, but feels less specialized for pure reasoning tasks. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gemini-gemini-advanced.md) |
| 3 | [Claude](https://openaitools.app/tool/claude-2) | 1,253,439,413 | +23.8% | Freemium | Delivers superior long-form coding artifacts and nuanced writing, but lacks DeepSeek's specialized open-weight reasoning models. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/claude-2.md) |
| 4 | [Grok](https://openaitools.app/tool/grok) | 203,846,050 | -0.8% | Freemium | Features real-time X social data integration, but is less cost-effective for dedicated developer coding workflows. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/grok.md) |
| 5 | [Perplexity](https://openaitools.app/tool/perplexity-ai) | 88,310,223 | -3.7% | Freemium | Real-time AI answer engine and research workspace combining live web citations with frontier reasoning models. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/perplexity-ai.md) |
| 6 | [Qwen 4 (Alibaba Qwen4)](https://openaitools.app/tool/qwen-4) | 35,101,353 | -6.2% | Freemium | Provides comparable open-weight foundation models and multilingual performance, but requires self-hosting or third-party inference setup. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/qwen-4.md) |
| 7 | [Cursor](https://openaitools.app/tool/cursor) | 23,297,751 | +8.4% | Freemium | The AI coding agent for building ambitious software | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/cursor.md) |
| 8 | [Kimi AI](https://openaitools.app/tool/kimi-chat) | 19,632,261 | -23.4% | Free | Excels at ultra-long document analysis and research, but lacks the same level of open-weight developer community support. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/kimi-chat.md) |
| 9 | [Ollama](https://openaitools.app/tool/ollama) | 9,421,973 | +4.3% | Free, Freemium, Paid | Enables running open-source models locally on consumer hardware, but lacks DeepSeek's cloud-scale hosted reasoning power. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/ollama.md) |
| 10 | [Readray (formerly Lilys AI)](https://openaitools.app/tool/lilys-ai) | 967,113 | -9.7% | Freemium | A proactive AI reading lens for papers, videos, and web pages | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/lilys-ai.md) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/deepseek-vs-zeli

More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)